This is another shed load of data. It was favorite reading spot of H.P. Lovecraft and his greatest
source of inspiration, Edgar Allen Poe. It is located in Providence, Rhode Island. The photo is recent.

“…our old Athenaeum, where Poe spent many an hour, and wrote his name at the bottom
of one of his unsigned poems in a magazine…” – HPL: Letter to James F. Morton, 3 May 1923

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

– H. P. Lovecraft

To what kinds of
piecing together of dissociated knowledge
might Lovecraft have been referring?
Here are a couple to consider…

“Unbelievable? You want to hear unbelievable?
Seven billion of us are crammed on a tiny speck of dust circling an 11,000 degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 252 times the speed of a rifle bullet and none of us ever thinks about it.”

– Indiana Beagle

 

“Sometimes I think we’re alone (in the universe.) Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.”

– Buckminster Fuller